


The Long Way Home

by fire_is_my_happy_place



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Holidays angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, TF2 Secret Santa 2015, Trans Male Character, Treat Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-27 00:55:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5027458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fire_is_my_happy_place/pseuds/fire_is_my_happy_place
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After many years of being friends, Dell and the Pyro are finally able to demonstrate their feelings about each other over the Smissmass holiday break. Contains trans!male Pyro and Dell struggling to figure out how to express attraction that doesn't resemble the way he's been taught to express attraction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Way Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Delphi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/gifts).



The Engineer paused in front of the unnaturally bright rows of candy, normal brand colors deluged in what the Pyro would call fresh blood red and sick-up green for the holidays. His carefully gloved hand hovered over bags of oversized marshmallows, trying to decide whether to buy the flavored kind or the plain. He meant to coax the boy out of the suit finally, the sugar an agreed-upon bribe between the two of them that let the Pyro pretend, in his own way, that it was safe to shed the rubber and let the Engineer pretend that his interest in the boy was entirely friendly and did not contain the strange, slow heat that had trickled into them both. Out of desperation, he grabbed both flavored marshmallows and plain ones, and prayed he wouldn’t end up having to eat either.

The Engineer frowned into the sheet of paper in his other hand, then sighed and pulled another five bags of marshmallows off the shelf, then followed them with several pounds of white chocolate embedded, as his mind persistently overrode the chirpy marketing phrase, with peppermint shrapnel. Several bags of soft peppermints followed fistfuls of M & Ms, Reece’s Pieces, and with a small mental shrug, the Engineer took one of everything else but licorice. Pushing the cart on, he bought a petite turkey, bacon, eggs, cornmeal, flour, several gallons of heavy cream, and more vegetables than he was sure the Pyro would want to eat.

The boy would give himself scurvy if allowed. He’d done it several times before.

In the liquor section, the Engineer bought as many different kinds of cream liquor as they had, grimacing at the pumpkin pie flavored bottle as he tucked it into the precariously piled basket. For himself, he bought tequila—the real kind, made with agave nectar instead of what he thought should be more accurately described as corn syrup and hangover in a bottle. Sweet had never been his favorite flavor, and he had no intention of drinking the awful stuff the Pyro favored. As an afterthought, he tucked a small bag of limes into the spare inch left in the child seat of the basket and headed to the cashier.

Who knew what the boy had or hadn’t been eating over the holiday week they’d been apart.

The boy probably hadn’t eaten. He tended to visit family for the first part of their Smissmas holidays, which for him meant visiting a hospital and a graveyard. Chances are good the boy had already made himself sick. The Engineer grimaced as he contemplated the state the Pyro would likely be in, his expression so angry and disgusted that the shoppers around him gave him a wide berth. That fact escaped him in his preoccupation, the widening empty halo around him and the shoppers who watched him as he passed.

At the checkout, the cashier blinked at the tottering pile. “What’re you, having a party, mister?” She lifted the first of the long line of liquor bottles on the conveyor belt between two fingers. “Must be a good one if you’re buying this much booze.”

Dell grunted, words truncated by the desire to be away from pretending to be a civilian, or at least someone who was throwing a party for the family everyone was assumed to have during the holidays. The Smissmas music droning on in the background while he shopped had killed the last of his ability to engage in pleasantries with anyone, and between it and the condition the Pyro was likely to be in, the Engineer would not have minded spending a little time on the field, watching someone die in a hail of bullets. “Something like that,” he growled, staring a hole through the conveyor belt.

The cashier’s face soured and she didn’t speak again, letting him pay the staggering total.

The Engineer towed the cart out of the store, peering around the mound in it as he crossed the parking lot to the mud-caked, dented truck he’d parked a fair distance from the entrance, just to maintain a certain amount of distance between himself and what he thought of as the holiday zombies. He loaded the back of his pickup and tied the tarp down tight over it, pleased that the weather would keep everything cool over the long drive. With an eye toward the tarnished sky, the Engineer took his gloves off as he closed the door behind him, flexing the fine motors of his Gunslinger and checking for the inevitable bits of fluff that would gum up its works. He shook the visible fluff out easily, then started the truck with a roar from the engine. As he turned out of the parking lot to start the trip back, he started the rigged music player with a sigh of relief to be away from the Smissmas music. As he drove, he hummed in a pleasant tenor along with a country song whose words had changed so many times he hadn’t bothered to learn the lyrics anymore.

The recycled tune, as with many of his favorite things, was as old as he was.

**< <<<< \----- >>>>>**

As Dell pulled off the highway and onto the unmarked gravel road that led to his cabin, he mentally thanked his grandfather for the millionth time for being shy of people and human contact. Dell wondered if working for TFI had done it, or if his grandfather had just been antisocial. He had a great deal of sympathy for the man though they’d only met a few times—something about the man’s reserve and nearly everything about the man’s single-mindedness had been echoed in his grandson, skipping the man between as if he hadn’t existed. The old man had seen the similarity immediately, and had left Dell the cabin before he disappeared entirely, along with a four-inch thick manual on how to run it and fifty years of incredibly advanced plans, notes, and drawings.

As the trees closed in over the road, the headlights made a strangely claustrophobic tunnel that had never ceased to make Dell feel a little safer every time he drove it. The continuous crunch of the wheels started to slow as the road started its long series of switchbacks up the side of the mountain, and he rolled down the window to trail his hand in the crisp bite of the air as the truck climbed. The Pyro would have arrived by now, and with any luck had started splitting logs. The cabin and the sub-basements beneath it were all heated and powered by a small nuclear generator—Dell was still trying to figure out how the old man had gotten his hands on that much uranium and the prerequisite refining machinery—so no fire was needed.

However, as if the old man had known what kind of man his grandson would be, the living room featured a sweet little fireplace, made with stream rocks from the nearest body of water, and what Dell believed had to be the most comfortable, suspiciously oversized couch and arm chairs he’d ever seen. The couch was more than wide enough for two people to lie pressed together on it, and the arm chairs reclined, doubling as a good place to take a nap. The living room was designed for the kind of comfort that only a crackling blaze, a blizzard, and good company could give, an incongruity when considered with the careful isolation of the cabin. Dell could only conclude that the old man had, at some point, kept his own company there, or had been planning to do so at some point.

The only drawback to the fireplace was splitting wood for the fire, something that had always left splinters and blisters on Dell’s flesh hand, no matter how often he’d done it. But that moment—a cup of coffee, good company, the fire, and the chill in the air as the snow fell—made the blisters worth it.

Dell still hoped the boy had saved him the trouble.

Rounding the last corner, he could see the parking lot. Dell killed the engine with a smile next to the Pyro’s beat-up Toyota, which had already gathered a hefty combination of pine needles and snow. Paranoid bastard that his grandfather had been, the man had carefully pruned trees until they grew over the small space, making the parking lot invisible from the air but insuring that any car or truck parked in it for long would have a paint job that was as much sap and bird shit as it was paint. _Of course_ , Dell thought, _any vehicle that made it up the trail probably belonged to someone more interested in using it than making it pretty_. He eyed the blistering tan paint of the Pyro’s Toyota, wondering if the old man had somehow seen into the future and known his grandson would only bring people up to the cabin who would fit that description.

 _Well_ , the Engineer thought, with a surge of admiration and chagrin, _or we have that much in common_.

The old man had planned for the end of the world, something that, when he sent the keys to his grandson at the beginning of the Cold War, Dell had often been grateful for. The cabin got no mail, and the phone and internet service were managed by a hack Dell had added and a tap on several buried lines whose location were supposed to be a secret to the public. Like most information it had been not so much secure as obscure, yielding to the patience Dell possessed in abundance for these kinds of projects. Dell had been able to find it with a certain amount of patience and time spent digging through the trash at several large companies during his holidays, and thanks to the remote location, no one had found the taps yet.

 _All-in-all_ , Dell thought, mind lingering on the greenhouses dug into the rock beneath them and the extensive EM spectrum shielding on the cabin and sub-basements, _the old man had done his best to ensure we’d live through just about anything_. The cabin itself appeared to be the kind of run-down, one bedroom thing you might find in any rural area, right down to the peeling paint and wood veneer over the steel plating of a tank. On the records, it had been purchased by a Mr. Jason Brown in 1938, and had never been given the benefit of electricity or running water. It even had an entirely functional and gratuitous outhouse that the old man made a point of insisting Dell use on occasion, for verisimilitude.

On the inside, the cabin had received the benefit of every last spare penny the old man had scraped up in his long and varied years of government and private sector work, and a very specific kind of genius. None of it was visible unless you were paranoid and the right kind of engineer with time to dig, or someone took you on a tour of it. Both were unlikely. Anyone entering the cabin without the right key, knowledge of where to find the number pad, and the correct key code would live a short, exciting life of roughly twenty-five seconds before some of the hidden armaments made them a messy pile of biological matter against the thoughtfully Scotch-guarded furniture. The first time the Pyro had visited without him, Dell had been terrified that he’d come home to find a mess, not a man, the Pyro’s occasional absentmindedness proving fatal.

But he’d been lucky. They’d both been lucky. The Pyro had always remembered this. He’d forgotten any number of other things, but not the combination, his key, and the code. The Pyro was the only person Dell had ever let stay at the cabin. When other people came calling, he had a rural, very normal house near Bee Cove, Texas that he almost never stayed in, explaining his nearly continual absences to his neighbors as work surveying remote locations for an oil company.

At the sound of his truck door slamming, the Pyro spilled out of the cabin just up the hill, nearly tripping in his eagerness. Neither were particularly demonstrative men, so after a brief pause spent simply looking at each other, the Pyro stepped around the Engineer to open the tailgate of the truck and load his arms with bags. The Engineer stood aside to let the Pyro pass, looking at the small changes silence and isolation had wrought on the boy: a straightened-spine and near-graceful confidence as he moved through the space between them. The boy was wearing his casual suit, something very like a diver’s gear, beneath his sweater, the mask off only as a concession to the drive there. His skin was sensitive still, years since the original burns, and he still felt shamed and uncomfortable with the way people stared at him. Winter, despite the bite of the cold, had always been the Pyro’s favorite season, as much because he could cover up as it was for the fires. The suit clung to him like a second skin, a matte black that dipped across his spine where the collar of the sweater had fallen. With a shake, the Engineer forced his eyes away from the Pyro’s broad back and scooped up an armload of bags.

Once inside, it was clear the Pyro was having a good day, despite the drive and the stares—the caddy by the living room door was full to overflowing with logs, and despite the opportunity and an expertly set-up pyramid of shavings, paper, and tinder, no fire had been lit. If it had been a bad day, there’d be a fire set with no supplies laid in for another, the Pyro sitting very nearly with his nose in the flames despite the pain of his scars, body haloed by the flames.

With a sniff of approval, the Engineer recognized pine and cedar in the fragrance of the room, and by the time he’d made his way to the small kitchen, he was humming Nat King Cole’s “Autumn Leaves.” The Pyro glanced over his shoulder, and recognizing the song, rewarded the Engineer with a brief smile.

Unloading the candy won another smile from the Pyro, one part wry and the rest delighted. His voice was rusty but clear, and he made fleeting eye contact as he spoke, his hands full of candy. “It’s hard to be this easy, Dell.” It was a running joke between them: the fact that Dell was willing to bribe the Pyro, the fact that the Pyro was willing to be bribed, and the fact that candy was such a damn cheap bribe for the Pyro’s company.

Dell snorted. “Darlin’, you’re many things, but easy ain’t one of them.” The Pyro’s face fell with his shoulders and the Engineer added, quickly, “I ain’t an easy man myself. Couldn’t be around you if you were easy.” He ignored the slight flinch when he put his arm around the taller man and squeezed. “Aww, hell, darlin’, you know I got a mouth on me. I’m sorry.”

He saw the man’s lips quirk, a tiny little movement, and knew he was forgiven. With a slight stab of regret, he let the Pyro go and let the subject wander into safer, familiar territory.

“You wouldn’t believe how much sugar I just bought you. I think I scared the cashier a bit. Probably thought I was going to give myself diabetes over the holidays.”

“I saw,” the Pyro said, shadow fading from his face, to be replaced by a familiarly teasing pout. “But you’re probably going to make me eat something terrible before I can have any, aren’t you?”

The Engineer pressed his metal hand to his heart, his expression full of wounded innocence. “Would I do such a thing to you, darl? Would I make you eat those horrible vegetables?”

Without a word, the Pyro pulled a bunch of celery from a bag with a playfully accusatory glare and shook it at the Engineer, plastic rustling. He let the Engineer pull it from his hand, irate expression widening into a crooked grin which pulled at the tight skin of his mouth.

“Darl,” the Engineer said, watching the Pyro’s grin, “you won’t even taste it in the dressing. Promise.”

The Pyro snorted his disbelief and went back to unloading the groceries. As Dell washed his hands to start cooking, the Pyro pulled up a chair and turned it to sit with his elbows on the back and his chin on his hands, comforted by the strange domesticity of the Engineer—a man who spent the majority of the year designing and deploying deadly machines now chopping onions with a soothing thunk, now scraping them into a pot, humming to himself the way he did when he was thinking, now wiping his hands on a checkered apron, now looking over to check if the Pyro was still sitting there.

The Pyro watched the Engineer raptly through the process of making chili, watching the way the light fell over his face as he moved through the kitchen, frown appearing and disappearing like magic as he worked, his satisfied smile as the chili started to smell good, the distress on his face when he thought he’d burned the cornbread.

There was something perfect in it—perfect and painful as a stab to the heart, the way the man did something for him, for just him, the way the man had let the Pyro into his life, the way he fussed over the Pyro as no other person ever had. Truth be told, sometimes he didn’t eat his vegetables on purpose, just because he knew the man would hunt him down, would fuss at him and insist that he eat something green right now, right now, do you hear me, darl?

The Pyro hoped it wasn’t pathetic, really, but he couldn’t stop himself from checking, just checking to see if the Engineer still cared. And if it was pathetic, well…. The Pyro blinked and sniffed once, drily, and forced his mind away from the familiar surge of worry, of terror that the Engineer would change his mind, that somehow the man would see through him and decide that there was, after all, nothing the Pyro had that he could possibly want.

At the sound of that sniff, the Engineer turned, spoon upright in his hand, a glob of tomato dribbling to the floor. “Don’t you dare,” he said, sternly. “You’re going to spend this week with me and you are not going to spend it like that.”

Looking down at the tomato on the floor, the Engineer swore and turned to put the spoon firmly back in the pot. Wiping his hands on his apron, he crossed the room and grabbed the Pyro’s shoulders. “It will be good,” he said, with a gentle shake. “Stop worrying about it. It will be okay.”

The Pyro’s familiar surge of irritation at the idea that one could just say it would be good and it would force things to be good was followed by surprise. The terrible urge to beg the Engineer to stay, to promise he still wanted the Pyro there faded for a moment, just a moment as the man gripped his shoulders, fingers digging into the thick cords of muscle and the scars over them. He smiled up at the Engineer again, shyly, as the Engineer let go of him.

“Don’t you go getting sad now, darl,” the Engineer said gently. “There’s no way I can eat this much candy alone.”

“Oh you won’t eat it,” the Pyro said automatically. “You don’t even like sweets.”

The Engineer walked back to the pot and stirred it again before answering. “Bound to be someone out there who desperately needs to get cavities over the season. I’ll give ‘em this much—at least respawn won’t let us get cavities. And you’d probably be round as a ball if it let us get fat.”

The Pyro let his hands sink down as he shrugged. “There are worse ways to go.”

**< <<<< \----- >>>>>**

Dell watched the boy wolf down two bowls of chili, nearly choking himself in his haste. He probably hadn’t eaten. Visiting his mother in the hospital and his sister’s grave fair killed any urge in the boy to take care of himself. He probably hadn’t bothered to shower, either, or to take his medication.

Getting the suit off him might be something of a challenge—as much like taming a wolf as anything else, not that one really tamed a wolf. _Best you can do_ , thought Dell, _is teach the wolf that you’re willing to feed them and you ain’t interested in kicking them_.

He picked as his chili as the Pyro ate. _The boy is so damn smart_ , Dell thought. _So damn smart and life has been so damn cruel to him_. For a moment, he was angry, just generally angry. Angry at a world that would let someone like the Pyro be treated the way he had been, be neglected the way he had been, be ignored and mistreated the way he had been.

It had originally been the flamethrower that had interested him—the boy refused to emerge from the shapeless asbestos suit they’d given him or his room for the first year of their contract. But on the field, watching the boy lug around his homemade flame thrower had taught the team respect for his reticence, and had taught the Engineer that somewhere, under that rubber, was a formidable talent for a certain kind of engineering. It had taken the entire year to convince the boy to let him touch the flamethrower, and another few months before he could get the boy to sit still long enough to let him talk about it. The praise he’d given its design, especially considering the fact that so much of it was improvised, had helped. It had also been honest—Dell had gone through undergraduate and then graduate school as an engineer, and knew how difficult that could be. The boy had managed an incredibly difficult engineering task, and managed it safely enough to have survived his original experiments with design and the inherent dangers of rigging a propane tank without a lick of help or encouragement from anyone.

Together, they’d improved on the design. With access to modern tools and materials, the boy had demonstrated virtuoso on the work bench, rapidly learning and annexing swathes of skills, trying and discarding multiple designs. Much like the Engineer, his focus could cut glass, and he wasn’t above losing a night of sleep in the excitement and involvement of discovery.

It was on one of those nights that the boy had finally discarded his mask with a snarl, throwing it over his shoulder to get closer to the circuit board he’d been soldering. Dell had stopped breathing, shocked by both the loss of the mask and the delicate features beneath it. At first glance, he’d thought the Pyro was female, but there were a ton of small clues, from the way the Pyro responded to male pronouns to the way he had, in his own way, fit right into to the team without any of the small differences Dell might have expected from a female person. _Of course_ , Dell thought, _could just be a masculine woman_. But the boy responded to male pronouns, was so guarded about his face and privacy that it was possible he was exactly what he suggested he was: male. Dell had done enough reading to know that the plumbing might or might not match the person, and that who a person is could be quite different than how everyone else thought they looked.

He’d also done enough reading to know that it wasn’t any of his damn business to comment on, and had been around the boy long enough to know he wouldn’t appreciate the attention, or any comment on the warmth that had followed his shock at seeing the boy’s face.

It had been the right choice. The boy had waited, curled over that circuit board like a coiled spring, for him to say something. When Dell hadn’t said anything, the boy had started to remove his mask whenever they worked together, late into the night. When Dell continued to not comment, the boy had also started to strip the outer layer of his suit down on hot nights, peeling the sweaty asbestos and rubber material away like a flower and exposing the thinner under suit, and along with it a slight belly and breasts that Dell had forced himself to refuse to see.

The boy, though heavily scarred, was in Dell’s opinion quite beautiful. Dell found it, to be honest, slightly confusing—not his attraction to the boy, but how to indicate it, or even how to think about it. He’d never realized how much of what he thought of as romance was a pattern that he’d simply absorbed. Somewhere, Dell had absorbed the idea that one romanced a woman in particular ways and a man not at all, and that there was nothing else, really. Everyone wore their costume, a dress or pants, and went through their roles, and a relationship came into existence where everyone knew what they were supposed to do about it.

It had taken him a year after he’d seen the boy’s face and that first surge of surprised heat to figure out how to feel about it.

Dell’s conclusion had been, quite simply, that it didn’t matter. Whatever the boy was or wasn’t in a sexual sense, he was Dell’s friend—dangerous, brave, smart, and a touch damaged, but Dell’s friend. True, the boy committed the kind of war crimes on the field that would send most troops away running. True, the boy sometimes forgot to bathe, and the suits he wore often reeked of kerosene, old sweat, and the peculiarly hamburger-like smell of blood and viscera that reminded them all that they were, in fact, meat.

And if Dell were really honest, he wanted, quite badly, to touch the boy. No matter what that meant he needed to do, he wanted to make the boy respond to him. He wanted to be with the boy. If that meant simply being his friend, he would. But Dell wanted, very badly, for it to be more.

He laid his spoon down gently against the rim of the bowl, realizing he’d been staring sightlessly into the thin rim of chili in the bowl for some unknown period of time. The Pyro, with his customary delicacy, hadn’t interrupted the Engineer’s thoughts, simply waited for him to look up again.

Seeing Dell look up again, his thoughtful frown easing, the Pyro burped and pushed his chair away from the table. “How do you always know,” he said, lacing his fingers over his belly. “How do you always know I haven’t eaten?”

Dell gave him a secretive smile and refused to answer. _Ain’t no safe answer for that one_ , he thought. _‘Cause the truth is, boy, you don’t eat healthy unless I sit on you_. He walked their dishes back to the sink and grabbed a bag of marshmallows. “Do you think,” he called, “that you could manage to get a fire started?”

With a low chuckle and the scrape of his chair, the boy stood and ambled into the living room. Dell followed him shortly, marshmallows and skewers in hand. With a grunt, he flopped onto the couch and watched the Pyro carefully, tenderly nurse the glowing embers into tendrils of flame with his breath. He wanted, not for the first time, to be able to reach out and run the fingers of his flesh hand through the ragged ends of the boy’s hair, to cup his jaw and draw him into a kiss, to demonstrate in the most sincere way he knew how that he wanted the boy, that he would always want the boy, and a million other promises that had the virtue of being as true as he knew how to make them.

After a moment, he realized the boy was watching him, the wariness in his eyes echoed through his whole body as he watched the Engineer stare at him.

Dell cleared his throat, wondering what the boy had seen in his face. “I thought we might start the desserts small today.” He wrenched the bag of marshmallows open and threaded a skewer through the puffy white lump. “Seems a bit like toasted marshmallow weather.”

The Pyro, alert to the growing heaviness in the Engineer’s stare, was not oblivious to what it meant, but was still wary of nasty surprises. He looked down at the skewer and accepted the peace offering with a mix of relief and obscure disappointment—Dell would stick to the script, of course, but for a moment the Pyro hoped he wouldn’t, that he would press ever so slightly so that they could both see what happened. “If I weren’t so full, I’d make you go get graham crackers and chocolate.”

The Engineer slumped backward into the couch with a heartfelt moan. “Goddamn it, I knew I forgot something. Graham crackers. I remembered the chocolate but not the damn crackers.”

The Pyro smiled at him. “Shit, I’m not that cruel. It’s hours back into town, and I’m too sleepy to bother with it.”

“Marshmallows are all for you, darl. I’m too stuffed to even think about putting anything else down there.” The Engineer laced his fingers behind his head and sighed. “And too damn tired to make that drive.”

As he watched, the Pyro toasted and ate several handfuls of marshmallows before neatly tucking the plastic down and putting the bag aside. Leaning back on his hands, the Pyro sighed, contented, and blinked sleepily into the flames. Silence stretched between them, broken by the occasional pop, crackle, and hiss of the flames as they ate through the wood.

When the Engineer realized they were both nodding, he broke that silence. “Darl,” he said hesitantly, “I sure would like it if we shared a bed tonight. Do you think we could?”

The Pyro sat up straight and looked over at him, measuring. They hadn’t done it before, had never managed to share a bed overnight. They could share workbenches, could practically sit on each other in the lab, could share the cabin, but had never shared a bed. He’d been waiting for the Engineer to say something—it was only too clear that the man carried some sort of torch for him, though it was sweet of Dell to try to hide it. _Nervousness_ , the Pyro thought, _but not fear_. _I’m nervous, but I’m not afraid. Not exactly_. _I haven’t done anything like this in a really long time_. He looked down at his suit, counting back the days since his last shower with a surprised jump that the Engineer immediately interpreted as a no. _Shit, it’s been three days since my last shower_.

The Engineer’s face fell, and then went neutral, blank as he could make it. The Pyro winced. This wasn’t how he’d hoped this would happen, both tiptoeing around for fear of offending the other. As the Engineer stood to go to his room, the Pyro laid a hand on his shin, the barest hint of pressure stopping the Engineer in his tracks. “I can try, but I need a shower first. It’s been… it’s been awhile.”

The Engineer took a sharp breath in and held it, hands opening and closing, before responding mildly. “Pajamas, if you’d like to wear them, are in the top drawer. I’ll get changed myself.”

The Pyro levered himself up and followed the Engineer into the bedroom, accepting a pair of pajamas and boxers he was surprised to find fit him before going into the bathroom and firmly shutting, then locking the door. The Engineer sighed, unsurprised by the click of the lock, and quickly changed into a pair of comfortable, flannel pajamas. After a moment of listening to the shower, he made a decision and left the room. The boy could invite him in, if he still wanted to, after his shower. He sat down abruptly on the couch, fingers digging sporadically into his knee caps, and waited, hoping he hadn’t ruined their strange friendship, or relationship, or whatever it was they had together.

In the shower, the Pyro undressed with his back to the mirror, a habitual gesture that helped him avoid some of the panic he felt when he had to confront his own reflection. He had known, even hoped that this moment was coming. Any other person making that request would have been knocked out, or as close to knocked out as the Pyro could manage. Any other person who asked him to share a bed would have been an enemy, someone who was asking too much, someone who had demonstrated that he or she was not to be trusted. The Pyro’s own history had far too many people in it whose interest in him was fetishistic, or manipulative, or abusive, and even though Dell had spent years patiently demonstrating care for the Pyro’s health and well-being, when it came to it, the Pyro still had all that history whispering in his ear, telling him that this was merely a precursor to something worse, that all those years of feeding him and trying to care for him were a joke and that he was about to get the punch line.

Physical violence was always a possibility, something he’d learned the hard way many years ago.

And yet, those years—what kind of person would wait so long, would be so damn careful, would do so much, if all they wanted was to get off, or to hurt. The Pyro looked up at the ceiling, the small room meeting abruptly over his head beside a shower that only looked rough, hiding multiple jets designed to beat the soreness out of overworked muscles.

The cabin itself was proof of something. This was Dell’s secret base, his hideaway. The Pyro flattened a hand over the chain that hung around his neck, the key to the cabin jangling momentarily on its ring. The fact that Dell had given him the keys to the one place on earth that had been designed to ensure his safety and comfort, no matter what else was happening, was proof of… what?

 _It’s too early to say anything about love_ , the Pyro thought with a stab of regret. _Would I even know it if it happened? Would he, after all we’ve been through?_ The Engineer was taciturn and sometimes sullen. If pushed, he could be vindictive and violent, setting up a gun to mow down the opposite team as they emerged, disoriented, from their spawn room in reprisal for a death at the hand of their spy.

 _We’re all violent_. The Pyro’s thoughts skipped briefly along a montage of his own behavior on the battlefield.

Underneath that well-deserved skepticism, something nagged at him—the sensation of having lied to himself about the situation, about Dell and what his request meant. _What does it mean that he’s waited so long, that he’s done so much?_

At that thought, fear—a surge of emotions poured out of some deep, horrible crevice inside him. Fear that the Engineer would change his mind, would see a woman where there was a man, would say something that broke him into tiny shreds, would say something that broke whatever it was they had together, would refuse to respect his boundaries. Fear that the Engineer would tell him to leave, that he would have to see that terrible disappointment in the man’s face when he saw him without the suit that protected his delicate, horribly disfigured skin.

And beneath that, another set of fears. Fear that the man would not reject him, that the man actually cared for him beyond the silly games they played together and the joke of the bribe. Fear of the horribly devouring passion of love, the way it seemed to make people demand more and more of you until there was nothing left of you at all, until they had eaten you down to the last tiny bit.

The Pyro took a deep breath, flattening a hand against the wall, head down. The sound of his breath was a ragged pant, an animal gone to bay in an enclosed space. Panic, as the reaction had been panic for most of his life. He hated panic. He hated the way it snuck up on him, hated it so much that he went out and killed his fear nearly every day with axe and flamethrower, screaming his defiance of it.

Squaring his shoulders, he stepped into the shower. Perhaps there was nothing there. Perhaps there was nothing to be found here. Perhaps his fears were unreasonable, and the man genuinely cared. As he lathered, he laughed at himself silently. If the Engineer didn’t care, why would he bother with all this?

 _If there’s a lie here_ , the Pyro thought, _Dell is the best liar in creation_. After a moment, he added, bleakly. _Or I’m the biggest idiot that ever was for believing it, for believing he sees me, that he wants me, not what he wants to see_.

His treacherous mind brought up his mother in the hospital, a few days earlier, the vacant stare she aimed through him as he tried to talk to her. _Where is my daughter_ , she’d said dully. _What did you do with my daughter? Go away and bring me my daughter._

It had been years and she still didn’t remember. Or perhaps she didn’t want to remember, her mind returning to the past like a familiar country, a place she primarily inhabited now as dementia ate its way through her.

The Pyro dug his nails into the calloused skin of his palms, using the small pain of the bite to remind himself where he was. He listed the things in the shower around him— _soap_ , he thought. _Sandalwood and bay rum. Shampoo. Razor. Comb. Sponge. I am now and this is now. I am here and now has enough things for me to think about_.

After a moment, the room focused again and he pushed away his mother. Turning the shower off, he ran a hand back and forth through his hair, flinging droplets from it, and opened the curtain.

Before he opened the door, he made himself look at his reflection. The pajamas had a pattern of faded blue stripes and a trimmed breast pocket, charmingly old-fashioned in the same way Dell was charmingly old-fashioned. They were made of thick, much washed cotton. He smelled like bay rum. His hair was combed back from his face. He was clean, as clean as anyone might be. He looked… he looked as he’d always looked. This was as good as it would get.

He left the suit off, because the only way to be brave is to get it over with.

The Pyro made himself meet his own eyes in the mirror. “He wants me to be here,” he told his reflection, quietly. “And he has done his best to show me that I matter to him.”

It did not make him feel better.

**< <<<< \----- >>>>>**

When he exited the bathroom to an empty bedroom, it felt like a kick in the chest. Where had the man gone? Had he changed his mind?

Anger, for a moment, then he heard the rustle of cloth in the living room. The Pyro peeked around the doorframe and saw the back of the Engineer’s head, the turned-down collar of his pajamas just visible above the couch. The man had banked the fire, leaving the lamps beside him on, and taken marshmallows and skewers to the kitchen. He’d also taken out several quilts and a pillow and laid them on the couch beside him.

Without turning, Dell spoke. “I thought it might be best if I waited for you to tell me if you still wanted me in there. If you don’t, it’s fine. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

It was precisely that kind of thing which had undone the Pyro in the first place, had undermined his guard and led him to take of his mask in the first place. Because where Dell was, he tried to make the Pyro feel safe. His heart hammering madly in his chest, the Pyro spoke. “Turn around, please.”

When the Engineer turned, he found the Pyro clinging to the frame of the bedroom door, his eyes wide with something just shy of panic, and his jaw hard with determination. The Engineer let his eyes wander down, seeking and finding the naked hollow of the Pyro’s throat with a pleasurable shock that was immediately the kind of warmth he had to beat down inside himself before it led him to scare the boy off entirely. Dell stood too abruptly and the Pyro shied back momentarily before forcing himself to stand straight in the bedroom door.

“I can’t promise,” the Pyro said, his voice shaking slightly, “that I can. I can promise I’ll try.”

“Good enough,” the Engineer said. “Can I… Can I say something, darl?”

The Pyro’s hands curled into fists at his side.

“Might be hard to hear.” The Engineer’s voice was apologetic.

The Pyro took a breath, squaring himself off as if about to be punched.

“Darl,” the Engineer said, “I just wanted you to know that I know this is hard. And that I’m grateful.”

The breath rushed out of the Pyro and he sagged slightly. When he didn’t back away, the Engineer slowly walked up and pulled him into a hug. After a moment of stiffness, the Pyro’s arms crept around the Engineer and he turned his head, leaning forward slightly to lay his head on the Engineer’s shoulder.

They stood like that for a moment, the Engineer holding the Pyro as if he were made of soap bubbles, and the Pyro clinging to him as a drowning man might a spar of wood. After a moment, the Pyro stepped back, his eyes glassy under the light.

“So,” the Pyro said, vacillating between teasing and something strangely like hope, “which one of us is the little spoon?”

The Engineer’s expression was worth the twinge of anxiety that the words had cost the Pyro to say. The Pyro tried to memorize the Engineer’s gaping mouth, wide eyes, low shoulders, and faint flush, rare expressions from a man who could be like granite in his stoicism. He couldn’t stop himself from giggling.

After a moment, the Engineer could see the humor of it and joined him.

When the laughter died down, the Engineer spoke. “Darl, when you decide to do something, you jump right in. Always was one of my favorite things about you. To answer you, I like to be the big spoon, but this is your show, so you tell me where to sleep.”

The Pyro looked down, a faint flush creeping through the scarred whorls on his cheeks. “I’ll try,” he murmured.

“All a man can ask for,” said the Engineer. “Mind if I lay down?”

The Pyro gestured at the bed and the Engineer settled into it, atop the quilt. After a moment, the Pyro gingerly joined him, scooting back until he lay within touching distance and pausing, before making himself close that gap and press his back to the Engineer’s chest.

“You don’t have to,” the Engineer rumbled, his arm pressed tightly to his side. The Pyro pulled it over himself loosely, the Engineer stiff behind him.

The Pyro waited for the familiar feeling of panic, for his brain rebelling against the idea that someone might want to touch him, to be close to him, for memory like a sickness to throw up an echo that would send him hurtling into the other room and the comfort of the dying fire.

There was nothing, nothing but the slowly loosening warmth of the man behind him, the feel of the man’s breath on the nape of his neck, the arm that reflexively tightened before carefully loosening. There was nothing there but the Engineer, waiting to see what would happen next.

In its own way, that was panicking—the patience that made the Pyro want to know when the other shoe would drop, when the Engineer would stop pretending and be as cruel as the Pyro had known practically everyone else to be. _And yet_ , he thought. _And yet he would have been cruel already. He could have been terrible already, and never risked giving me this place, never risked going to sleep with me in the other room_. _He knows what I could do to him_.

“Why,” the Pyro finally said, and the Engineer could hear the loneliness in his voice, the fear of being rejected, of being thrown away the way the people around him had seemed to throw him away, over and over.

“Darl,” the Engineer said, battling to keep the sadness from his voice, “that question has so many answers I couldn’t possibly list them all. I’ll give you one, though. You have one of the most beautiful minds I’ve ever met. Couldn’t have gotten to know you without feeling something for you.”

The Pyro gasped, and the arm around him tightened. When the Engineer could feel the stomach muscles beneath his arm shake, he pressed his lips to the back of the Pyro’s head, burying his nose in the smell of shampoo and beneath it the smell of the Pyro. “If you want to turn around, I’m absorbent,” he murmured.

The Pyro turned, after a moment, and let the Engineer cuddle him in close, pressing one light kiss after another to his forehead and then simply holding him as it washed through him—his mother’s face, the holidays and their terrible insistence that everyone had a family that loved them, the terrible illogic of his fear and the terrible rightness of it, the way experience had made every last bit of it true. When Dell didn’t push him away, the Pyro’s arms curled around him, holding him bruisingly tight, clinging to him as if daring Dell to try to run away.

The Pyro fell asleep like that, too tired to move, his arms finally loosening as sleep pulled him away. Dell shifted the Pyro’s comatose body into a more comfortable position and covered them both. He lay awake for a time, watching sleep smooth the lines from the Pyro’s face.

“Darl,” he said softly, hoping the boy would sleep through it, “there ain’t much I wouldn’t give to keep you here, to keep having moments like this. Wish I could tell you wakin, but you ain’t had the kind of life that’d let you believe me. Best I can do is keep showing you.”

Dell took a breath. “If you weren’t here, darl," he whispered, "the holidays wouldn’t be worth much to me.”

It took him several hours to fall asleep, several hours of wondering if asking the Pyro to do this would scare the boy off the next morning, wondering if he had done the right thing, if he had ruined everything and been too hasty, if the boy would think that he was just after whatever badness had so hurt the boy at some point earlier in his life.

He woke once in the night to find the Pyro curled around him, and smiled.


End file.
